WiFi security and its future on the Mac

Jason Snell and Glenn Fleishman talk about the future of WiFi on the Mac and …

The recent WiFi security exploit for the Mac and the response from both the security research firm SecureWorks and Apple has been covered alreadymany times before, but in MacWorld's recent Podcast, Jason Snell and Glenn Fleishman give a different perspective, comparing this to Apple's past responses to security exploits. Besides the controversy of who reported the exploit first and the demonstration, Glenn describes it as the most serious security hole for the Mac OS X to date.

"Apple’s patches for what they term never-demonstrated-exploits, is the worst security hole in Mac OS X ever. But it’s patched."

As to what we can expect to see in future versions of WiFi in Apple products, there are a few different opportunities ahead for them. The first is what version will be used—802.11g or 802.11n—in the iTV? The second draft of 802.11n is due March of 2007 and is due to be out by the first quarter of the same year. The second is that according to ABI Research, by 2011, 250 million consumer electronic devices will include embedded WiFi and over 90% of them will be using the 802.11n standard. That is a lot of devices to bring into the “The Digital Hub” and stream iTMS content to.